"All a misunderstanding, my love."

Canker in the Heart

May we never lose sight of one thing: the "canker in the heart" of Anne Rice’s collected works is a mother’s grief. From that grief flowed a wellspring of macabre beauty, as red and as thorny as any rose. Honor her.

[...] I can do the things now that you used to do. I could fight those wolves on my own..." Her voice trailed off as she was lost in her thoughts. "The important thing," she said after a long moment, "is that we can go wherever we wish now, Lestat. We're free."

i mean, at this point these are basically ocs, including lestat. arguably he's even more mischaracterised than he already was. in the novels, the emotional structure of the relationship is completely different. what produces lestat's fixation on gabrielle is her radical emotional detachment, combined, i would argue, with strong textual AND subtextual suggestions of abuse from a third party--the marquis. despite everything, she is still the one person he experiences as loving him, and the text repeatedly implies that she is trapped within the same system that is damaging him. when lestat says he loses her behind many doors, the image evokes both emotional withdrawal and material confinement. lestat himself is imprisoned and beaten by his father. gabrielle is confined by an aristocratic marriage whose primary function is dynastic reproduction. anne rice never states it outright, but the novel is haunted by the possibility that lestat and his brothers are the products of marital rape. what makes lestat identify so strongly with gabrielle is that he recognises in her another victim of the same structure that has shaped his own life. the forms of violence are different, but the novel persistently places them in relation to one another. they come to see themselves almost as extensions of one another because each recognises in the other the marks of a shared captivity.

the show seems to be gesturing towards some version of this dynamic but fails to articulate it. gabrielle pursuing lestat sexually, or appearing to demand sex was simply not part of their relationship in the books. anne rice's treatment of incest is far stranger and more complex than that. in a recognisably female gothic mode, the locus of injury is displaced away from the mother-son relationship itself and located instead in the patriarchal structures that organise both their lives. more specifically, the aristocratic structures that reduce gabrielle to a wife and mother and lestat to an heir and son. neither functions primarily as the other's victimiser.

which is why i think what you're describing is much closer to the logic of the "viaticum for the marquise" scene. the traditional viaticum prepares someone for death; lestat's intervention interrupts that process. by making gabrielle a vampire, he is not simply saving her life but severing her from the identities that have defined and imprisoned her. the marquise and the wife die. in an important sense, the mother dies as well. the scene is incestuous in the same way much of anne rice's vampire symbolism is incestuous. blood functions as the closest equivalent to sexual consummation in the chronicles, and the novel is perfectly aware of the implications. but the point is not that a hidden sexual desire is finally being fulfilled. the point is that the social identities which made them mother and son are themselves being dismantled. lestat is quite literally snatching gabrielle away from the patriarchal bonds that made her a mother in the first place.

that is what makes the relationship so difficult and so unusual. once those bonds have been broken, it is largely lestat who attempts to establish a connection with gabrielle outside the terms that previously governed their lives, and for perhaps the first time she does not entirely withdraw from him. but she has never been permitted to inhabit motherhood except through violence. her children are inseparable from the conditions under which they were conceived. what lestat seeks from her is a form of recognition and intimacy that neither of them has been able to access before. gabrielle is willing to grant it, yet the only available language for that intimacy remains the language of mother and son. what follows is not the fulfilment of a hidden desire but the collapse of a kinship structure that never functioned properly in the first place.

the discomfort of those scenes comes from that contradiction. they are no longer mother and son in any ordinary sense, yet they cannot entirely cease to be mother and son either. anne rice leaves them suspended there. reducing the relationship to gabrielle aggressively pursuing lestat sexually flattens something far more complex and interesting. it replaces a story about damaged kinship + coercive motherhood, and the aftermath of a shared captivity with a far more familiar narrative that the novels were never especially interested in telling.

Is that three books? Wow, that's so many! I love that you love your books, but let's do one at a time, okay?

It's okay... here, I'm going to put Queen of the Damned and Tale of the Body Thief right here! And after we take our nap, our mind will feel better, and our imagination will be so big! And we can make a list of what we learned in The Vampire Lestat!

And when The Vampire Lestat is ALL DONE 👏 then we will talk about starting Queen of the Damned! Does that sound fun?

Nooooo, we can't just say memory is a monster again. Noooooo, we can't just say the art of recollection when we forget or when we get confused about what we did or didn't read or write down. It's okay to be confused, but what isn't ok, Rolin? That's right. Lying! Just lying to the audience is cheap and disrespectful! So let's not rush and tell lies where we should've instead been so so patient.

HE WAS AWKWARD AND WEIRD AND NERDY IN THE BOOK

HE CUT HIS HAIR AS SOON AS HE FELT HE NO LONGER NEEDED TO IMPRESS TWINKS

He's a pedophile because he's pathetic

AKASHA CRUSHED HIM BECAUSE SHE WATCHED HIM BE MID FOR TWO MILLENIA

If you didn't get that from the book already idk what to tell you

AND IT'S STILL OK TO BE ENTERTAINED BY HIM AS A CHARACTER

You don't have to agree with everything he does to be entertained

And it we're entertained by murder in general and Louis paying a waitress to be Claudia and whatever trauma has ever been inflicted on Armand by anyone...